The interview with producer James Cope, however, was filled with all kinds of interesting details that we couldn't fit in the final piece. Read on for what we can expect from a third game, the possibility of a Horde Mode in the near future and the surprising reaction to Orbs in the original.

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A mode we thought could work with Freaks in the game is a Horde-style mode - was this something you considered during development?
"Yes, it is. I can't really say any more than that though."

It is maybe something to be announced?
"It's something we're looking at, and yeah, it would suit a Horde mode. The idea of having waves of Freaks attacking four different players is very compelling, and it's actually almost what the co-op game is in places. Like the Freak lairs are actually they're kind of like the Horde mode on their own anyway once you start the Beacon detonations and everything. It is four players against waves of Freaks, you do get that Horde mode experience there anyway. But it is something we want to develop into a game mode."

Maybe as DLC, then?
"Maybe, I mean, we're looking at it, we have looked at it, and it's a really compelling idea. You're exactly right, it would suit it very well."

The amount of Freaks on screen is impressive - have you pushed it to see what the maximum number is at any one time?
"We accidentally got it to the point where it was just stupid. It's a hard to control system, it's got a bit of a mind of its own sometimes. The designers can accidentally cause it to go completely crazy if they're not careful. We've pushed it to the point where the game just starts breaking, the frame rate just falls apart. And it looks amazing, I wish we could… maybe for the next game we could push it even further. You saw it yourself just now, looking down big streets is just, thousands of the things, it's just a sea of Freaks sometimes. I'd love to be able to do more of that. I'd love them to be able to swarm all over buildings and all that kind of stuff. So maybe for the future."

Speaking of the third game, would changing cities be something you would consider?
"We want to do more than that, we want to do more than that. We definitely have to move cities this time. We've been trying to introduce more characterisation into Crackdown to be able to do that. The Cell and Catalina Thorn are very important for Crackdown 2 and what we might do in the future, and the Agency is very important. We want to be able to explore more of the universe, without some of the restrictions we've created ourselves with where we are at the moment. But that really is a very early, early stage of not even existing yet in any kind of idea yet, we just want to set ourselves a big challenge for what we want to do next. We've got a lot of stuff to work with, a lot of story arc we can work with, and what we want to do is set up the right world for that to exist in."

Back to the first Crackdown, did you anticipate such a huge response to collecting Agility Orbs?
"We hoped that people would understand that they gave you benefit. The real secret of Agility Orbs was that they were a closed feedback system. You collect them, you got better, then you got more abilities and you got better at collecting them. That closed feedback system is really addictive. We knew it was going to be a fundamental part of the game, as it was the only way you could be become a superhero. It was the only way you could jump across buildings and stuff like that. We knew it had to be fundamental.

"We didn't know that people would get so, so insanely addicted to them. Graeme [Wright, the designer] spent, I dunno, four days solid trying to find his last Agility Orb. It's just insane. So yeah, it was a surprise, but also one that we hoped would have worked, and it did. The only that's interesting about that is I meet a lot of people that claim they've collected all the Agility Orbs, but I don't think that can be true considering the number of stats that say otherwise. I think people are very close."

So most people haven't got close?
"No. There's very few people who have collected all of them, very very few. If you include Hidden Orbs and Agility Orbs, there's less than one percent of people that have been able to do that. There's about two and a half perfect that have all the Agility Orbs. It's interesting statistics."

Do you hope for the sequel that people find more Orbs?
"No, I want to be able to retain that exclusivity. I think for things like that it's important you have that bragging right. I think it's a good discussion point for all of the game. Again like I say, although we've levelled the difficulty of some things and we've made other things harder, I still think it's good we have that absolute top two or three percent of people that have that real ability to say I've done something special."

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